Hi All,
My name is Connie and I came to Eskimo as a place to host my webpage portfolio (http://www.constancewohlford.com/) at the suggestion of The Carl. I used to be in accounting but my career goal is to work as a database administrator/data analyst. So I went back to school and recently graduated with a degree in Computer Information Systems. Now I am employed as a Computer Support Technician at the University of Washington.

I am also a ski instructor, a Ham (KG7DTK), and a former Girl Scout Leader (11 yrs). I live in the Pacific Northwest and hope to move away for two years for graduate school somewhere and then come back and stay here forever. My current projects involve setting up my own MySQL and Apache system on a raspberry pi and trying my hand at 3D printing. I appreciate being part of a community of folks that are making good materials in our increasingly consumer world.

The Raspberry Pi is a nifty bit of compact technology for the price. Another cheap box to get are the Ubiquity routers. You get a dual core 500 Mhz processor with Debian installed, 4GB of RAM and 4GB of flash. The flash drive can easily be swapped out for something much bigger. This gives you a box with 3 gigabit Ethernets and a useful amount of CPU and RAM for $100 approximately, and that's case and power supply included.

Which Router has the Debian installed? Is it this one: https://www.ubnt.com/edgemax/edgerouter-lite/ ? It is lacking USB and SD but seems to make up for it in easy headless use. Actually it has a single USB slot with a USB drive internal to it. The drive is only 2GB but can be swapped out for something larger. It is exactly that Unit. I've added wheezy debian repositories to mine and added fail2ban to discourage
brute force password attacks which up to that point were ongoing.

All of the Ubiquiti Networks Edgerouters, whether it be Lite or Max or anything in between, are based upon Debian, stretch at the moment, and Vyatta routing software which just leverages Linux routing and IP tables but provides a very nice user interface on top of it. Being debian based, you can add the debian repos and then install anything you want within the limits of memory and disk space, and for disk they use a thumb drive, the one provided is rather small but thumb drives are very cheap these days and it is very easy to replace although you need a machine to copy the files as it only has one USB slot.